We love war, and we will savour it like gourmets as long as it lasts. War is horrifying, and precisely because it is horrifying and tremendous and terrible and destructive, we must love it with all our male hearts.5
Closely linked to the nationalists were the Futurists, a group of painters and intellectuals who exalted speed and worshipped technology. For their founder, the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘a roaring automobile that seems to ride on a hail of bullets’ was more beautiful than a great Hellenistic sculpture in the Louvre, the Winged Victory of Samothrace. This hysterical character revelled in his iconoclasm, his desire to shock and his rejection of the world’s artistic heritage. He aspired to introduce punching into ‘the artistic struggle’ and encouraged people ‘to spit every day on the Altar of Art’. Library shelves should be burned, canals should be diverted to flood museums, and both Venice and Florence should be flattened for the sake of human progress. Yet the Futurists’ targets went beyond the artistic. In their notorious manifesto, published on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909, Marinetti announced, ‘We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene … and scorn for women.’ Since women had been scorned for decades and in parts of the country enjoyed fewer rights than before unification, there was little the Futurists could do to make things worse. Their movement’s cult of violence, however, which was extolled in similar terms by nationalists and by that saturnine poet and sometime politician Gabriele D’Annunzio, helped create a political-cultural atmosphere that encouraged people to think of war as something necessary, inevitable and indeed hygienic. Even after the Great War, when the hygiene had taken over 600,000 Italian lives, Marinetti was calling for the abolition of pasta on the grounds that it encouraged pacifism. Luckily, any credibility he may have possessed when launching this campaign was punctured when he himself was photographed munching his way through a bowl of spaghetti.6
In 1911 the Futurists joined the nationalists and other adventurists in demanding the conquest of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, the Ottoman provinces of Libya. For years, as they reminded their fellow Italians, they had ‘glorified love of danger and violence, patriotism and war’, which they defined afresh as ‘the only hygiene of the world and the only educative morality’. Many on the Left opposed the project, including a young socialist journalist, Benito Mussolini, whose violent anti-imperialism landed him in jail. So did some of the country’s finest and most independent minds, such as Einaudi and Salvemeni, who realized the expense would be huge and guessed that rewards from this ‘enormous sandpit’ would be meagre. Giolitti himself was neither eager for a war nor deluded about the economic benefits of colonialism. Other liberals shared his views yet reckoned that Italy should try to do something manly somewhere. The British were in Egypt and the French were in Tunis, almost in sight of the Italian islands of Lampedusa and Pantelleria; Italy thus ought to acquire some space in north Africa, even if only to prevent the French from occupying it. The country required a modicum of military prestige, as even so great a liberal as Fortunato admitted. After ‘a millennium and a half of shameful history’, he thought Italy needed to ‘secure a virile victory’ over somebody so as ‘to be able to face the future with confidence’. Unlike the Greeks, who had gained independence in 1830 by defeating the Turks, the Italians had never won anything by themselves. ‘For the first time in my life,’ he told his friend Salvemini, ‘I have a vision of the sanctity of war.’7
Nationalists and Futurists knew that Italy was a signatory of the Hague Conventions and a guarantor of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, yet this knowledge made an invasion of Libya seem all the more exciting. They were proud that aggression would entail the breaking of treaties, the defiance of Europe and a revival of ‘the traditions of Cesare Borgia and Machiavelli’. While itching for a real battle, they were, however, convinced that conquest would be easy because the Turkish garrisons in north Africa would surrender, and the Arab population would not fight. Little notion of une mission civilisatrice entered their heads. They would go to Libya to enrich and aggrandize Italy; they would find minerals, they would find water, they would make the desert bloom. A leader and theorist of nationalism, Enrico Corradini, visited a Libyan oasis and went into ecstasies about the wild trees laden with olives and vines so heavy with fruit that bunches of grapes were lying on the ground. ‘Instead of a desert,’ he announced, ‘we are in the Promised Land.’8
The clamour for war became so loud that Giolitti decided with some reluctance to invade in the autumn of 1911. The Italian navy bombarded Tripoli, the army defeated the Ottoman garrisons there, and after a few weeks Italy announced the annexation of Libya, even though its forces occupied only 1 per cent of that enormous territory. As Turkey needed troops for its war against the Balkan League, it signed a treaty in 1912 that recognized Italy as the de facto ruler of both Libya and the Dodecanese islands, which had also been captured. The Italians believed the war was over and congratulated themselves on a great victory.
The treaty, however, applied only to Italy and the Ottoman Empire. With considerable naivety, the Italians had assumed that Libya’s Arabs would be pleased to see them and grateful to be rescued from their Turkish oppressors. They were thus astonished and furious when early on in the war an Arab force attacked them and won a small victory. Claiming that the Arabs had proved themselves to be ‘treacherous rebels’, Italian commanders sanctioned reprisals so murderous that even Kaiser Wilhelm objected. This policy was in any case a failure. The revolt intensified, and, after three more years of fighting, Italy retained only a few towns along the coast. Although the Italians struck some 140 different campaign medals to commemorate their Libyan triumphs, the real victors of the war were their opponents, the bedouin of the Senussi Islamic order.9
The prime minister was under no illusions about the performance of the army, but he could not let the public know the truth. He thus invented victories and falsified figures to protect Italians from learning that their generals were so inept they could not win battles unless they outnumbered their enemies by a ratio of ten to one. Neither could Giolitti let people know that the war had been expensive, cruel and ultimately unsuccessful. Returning soldiers might wonder why so many people had been killed to acquire a few palm trees and a desert, but the government succeeded in convincing a jubilant populace that resurgent Italy had performed feats worthy of the Roman Empire. The war thus became popular and led to a sprouting of establishments with African names, a Bar Tripoli in a town’s piazza or a Caffè Benghasi on its Via Cavour. Monuments were erected and street-names were changed to reflect the recent glory, especially in the north, where most of Italy’s armchair imperialists lived: the city of Turin named streets and piazzas after almost every place that had been occupied by Italian forces in Libya, Eritrea and Somaliland. The pretence of victory may have been Giolitti’s greatest disservice to his country, because the lie encouraged too many Italians to rejoice and feel warlike. Thus they soon became tempted to participate in the great conflict that was about to engulf Europe.
BELLICOSE ITALY
The third monarch of united Italy was Victor Emanuel III, who became king after his father’s assassination in 1900. Short in stature, modest in character and retiring in disposition, he was not at all like his predecessors. Although he too had suffered a mainly military education, he liked reading books, and his interest in warfare was historical rather than physical. Neither as pompous as his father nor as bombastic as his grandfather, his sense and moderation in the early years of his reign did much to raise the prestige of the monarchy. Yet he was also a marrowless man, whose characteristics of fatalism and irresolution led him to make a series of decisions between 1915 and 1946 that were disastrous for his country and fatal to his dynasty. In 1915 and 1940 he joined world wars that were unpopular with most of his subjects; in 1922 he refused his own government’s request to declare martial law and prevent Mussolini from coming to power; and in the 1940s his failure to acknowledge his unpopularity by abdicating in favour of his so
n (until it was too late) encouraged Italians to vote for a republic.
In 1914 Italy was still a member of the Triple Alliance with Austria and Germany, which seemed no more logical then than it had at its conception in 1882. It certainly made no sense to Victor Emanuel, an anglophile who disliked the Germans, especially their Kaiser, who treated him with arrogance and condescension. Nor was it in the interests of Italy to be aligned against Britain, a country which, apart from supplying it with coal, had always supported it, had never tried to conquer it, and whose navy would be extremely threatening to its coastline in the event of hostilities. At no stage in its 150-year-old history has Italy needed to fight a war, and it should have been easy to avoid one that pitted its old supporters, France and Britain, against its more recent allies. Yet the country never liked to stay on the sidelines, at least not for very long, and the belligerent Powers in 1914 suspected that, despite the neutrality proclaimed in August, it would join the side most likely to win and demand a high price for doing so.
Italy’s dilemma about whose side to join in a European conflict was not a new one. Indeed it had existed for so long that military planners had never known whether to build fortifications on the north-eastern Alps against Austria or in the north-western mountains facing France. At the outbreak of the Great War the dilemma hinged on the question of how much territory the rival sets of allies could offer. War against France was often a temptation because the French were irritatingly successful neighbours who had grabbed Tunisia, even though it was closer to Italy. Yet apart from a slice of north Africa, Italy could not aspire to gain very much from France except possibly Nice and perhaps Corsica, an island with associations with Genoa and the (originally Florentine) Bonapartes, but not likely to be much more of an asset than Sardinia.
More tempting was the idea of fighting the traditional enemy Austria, even though it had been a formal ally for thirty-three years, because victory would gain Italy the terre irredente, the ‘unredeemed lands’ still in Habsburg hands such as the Italian-speaking city of Trento and the partly Italian city of Trieste. Known as ‘irredentists’, the Italian aspirant redeemers promoted this scheme of conflict as a fourth ‘war of independence’, as what the philosopher Giovanni Gentile considered a struggle to complete the Risorgimento, to obtain the desired lands and to achieve for the nation a sense of regeneration. They did not pretend that they would be fighting to liberate an oppressed people because even their foreign minister had recently praised the Austrians for their excellent administration of Trento and Trieste. Instead they would be fighting so that they could consider themselves – and be considered by others – as a martial nation.
In the spring of 1915, encouraged by Germany, the Austrian government offered Italy territorial concessions to induce it to remain neutral. Vienna was willing to give up Trento and most of the surrounding province, to grant autonomy to Trieste, to withdraw in Friuli as far as the east bank of the Isonzo River, and to approve an Italian occupation of Valona on the Albanian coast of the Adriatic. For Giolitti as for most politicians, this seemed a generous offer that should be accepted. Yet the government, led by Antonio Salandra (the prime minister) and Sidney Sonnino (the foreign minister), dismissed it as ‘dubious and absolutely inadequate’. This pair of politicians had decided that Italy must join the war and obtain for itself territory far in excess of the ‘unredeemed lands’. Realizing that they were in a minority, they worked in secret – ‘we two alone’, as Salandra told his partner – preventing anyone except in due course the king from knowing what was going on and keeping parliament in recess for six crucial months in case it demanded the right to debate matters of war and peace. The behaviour of Sonnino was perplexing to those who remembered him as a social reformer, a prudent economist, a sceptic of colonialism and a scoffer at the idea that Italy had any serious claim to either Trento or Trieste. Although in August 1914 he wanted Italy to join Austria’s side straightaway, he then completely changed his mind. Together with Salandra, he also abandoned the essential Mazzinian tenet that people should own and govern their own territories for a policy that would gain Italy expanses of Habsburg territory where Italians were in a minority, often a very small one.
Salandra and Sonnino haggled hard in their secret negotiations with the Triple Entente – Britain, France and Russia. As the prime minister admitted in an unfortunate phrase, Italy’s ‘sacred egoism’ was the determinant of his country’s foreign policy; no moral considerations were apparently involved. At the secret Treaty of London, which Victor Emanuel authorized in April 1915, the Italians were promised, along with Trieste and the Trentino, Gorizia, Istria, the South Tyrol, part of Dalmatia, a bit of Albania and most of the islands of the eastern Adriatic. If all went well in the war, the nation would acquire a million people who were not Italians but Croats and Slovenes and German-speaking Austrians. In return for these promises, Italy was obliged to declare war on both Germany and Austria, though in the event it delayed its declaration against Berlin for another sixteen months, persisting until September 1916 in exporting goods to its allies’ chief enemy.
Very few people were aware of the treaty’s terms until they were published by Russia’s Bolshevik government at the end of 1917. Many Italians were then appalled to learn that they had been fighting not only for the unredeemed lands but also for territory that was not by any standards Italian. Their country’s support had been put up for auction, and their young men had been dying not, as in the Risorgimento, for the patria but for what war memorials were soon calling ‘greater Italy’, a grander, larger and more powerful Italy that included Slav territories as well as the German-speaking South Tyrol. Salvemini lamented that Italy had thus entered the war with ‘the knife of Shylock rather than the liberating banner of Mazzini’.10
A majority of parliamentarians opposed the idea of their country going to war, and over 300 of them left their visiting cards in Giolitti’s hotel in Rome as a sign of support for the old statesman’s attempt to stop Italy from joining the hostilities. Opponents of the war included the socialists, most active Catholics in parliament and the pope, Benedict XV, who refused to sanction it as a just cause. The principal interventionists were the nationalists, men such as Papini who had trumpeted the need for blood to oil the wheels of the future and for ‘cadavers to pave the way of all triumphal processions’.11 Nationalists and Futurists were united in believing that a bloodbath would ‘purify’, that it would regenerate the nation, that it might even be a spiritual experience that would wipe out the stain of Lissa and Custoza. Giolitti’s opposition gave them new opportunities to ridicule the former premier and to brand him and other ‘neutralists’ as defeatists and even traitors: D’Annunzio excelled himself by inviting cheering crowds to kill such people. Although the interventionists were easily outnumbered by opponents of the war, they were well organized and knew how to influence public opinion. During what they called ‘the radiant days of May’ 1915, they brought huge crowds on to the streets and into the piazzas, arousing them to a state of delirium and inciting them to shout day after day for war. While this support was doubtless pleasing for the government, it did not influence the decision that had already been taken by the three men who counted, the prime minister, the foreign minister and the king. Victor Emanuel admitted later to the British ambassador that Italy had gone to war despite the fact that large majorities of its population and its parliament had been opposed.
The leaders of the combatant powers were criticized later for not foreseeing the length of the conflict or the scale of the carnage. Yet they had the excuse that, as their countries had not fought in Europe for several generations, it was difficult to predict the effect that machine guns, trenches and barbed wire might have on the tactics of a battle. Salandra and Sonnino had no such excuses. Although the prime minister claimed that an Italian invasion of Austria would quickly finish the war, he had had ample time since August 1914 to notice that invasions were no longer the speedy affairs they had once been. A glance at the stalemate on the W
estern Front should have been enough to convince him that the tactical advantage lay with the defending force, while a study of the battles that had already been fought, from the Marne to the Masurian Lakes, should have shown him that the war he demanded would cost hundreds of thousands of casualties. Lack of foresight was accompanied by such incompetence as a war leader that Salandra was forced to resign in 1916. In later years he advised the king to appoint Mussolini as prime minister and, despite subsequent qualms about fascism, he became a senator of the kingdom.
The chief theatre of war for the Italians was the valley of the Isonzo in Friuli, where they expected to defeat Austria (which was simultaneously fighting the Russians in the north and the Serbs in the south) before crossing the Carso Plateau and capturing Trieste. It turned out to be the most contested zone in the whole war. While their allies on the Western Front fought three battles of Ypres, the Italians engaged the Austrians in no fewer than twelve battles of the Isonzo, a statistic that by itself testifies to the limited imagination of the Italian commander, General Luigi Cadorna. The first eleven ended in stalemates, the front line advancing or sometimes retreating a few kilometres, but the last in 1917 (usually known as Caporetto) was a thumping victory for the Austrians and their German allies.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 35